A surprising percentage of people with autism also suffer from seizures, but doctors have been baffled by this overlap for decades. Now, various groups of scientists have begun exploring how the same genetic risk factors and aberrations in nerve signaling in early brain development might underlie both these disorders. Marissa Miley reports on how solving this riddle could point to better treatments for epilepsy and autism.

In 1943, the Austrian-born psychiatrist Leo Kanner published a landmark paper that was the first to use the term ‘autistic’ to describe a specific collection of social, language and cognitive problems. But even though Kanner, then director of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, meticulously recorded the medical histories of the 11 children on whom he based his work, he was at a loss as to how to explain a mysterious pair of seizures suffered by a five-year-old boy named John F. “Neurologic examination showed no abnormalities,” Kanner wrote.

Nearly seven decades later, scientists have learned much more about autism — and have also begun gleaning hints as to why it sometimes appears along with seizures. For starters, current epidemiological surveys have revealed that between 15% and 30% of people with autism also suffer from epilepsy to some degree.

“There’s a much bigger overlap than what we thought, and that overlap has a lot to do with brain development,” says neurologist Frances Jensen, director of both translational neuroscience and epilepsy research at Children’s Hospital Boston. “We are finding connections between previously assumed unrelated disorders that we never could have imagined.”

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